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The Four Spent the Day Together centers on individuals pursuing new beginnings, struggling to escape drugs or toxic relationships, only to find hope curdling into violence. The author often employs the phrase "clean slate", making it deliberately jaded through its repetitions. Phrases such as "He was ready for a new beginning" and "They decided to make a fresh start" recur in the text. Meanwhile, the author herself appears to be undertaking her personal new beginning, since this appears a different type of work – observational, truly literary. But then it reveals itself to be laden with the familiar conflicts and aesthetics as her previous works.

From Chance Novelist to Renowned Book

The writer was originally an artist who became a writer almost accidentally with her 1997 groundbreaking book I Love Dick, made up of letters to an unreceptive lover, elevating personal female narrative from humiliation into assassination. She kept producing books, but the three subsequent compelling and abrasive novels missed the power and directness that the correspondence format imparted to the voice of I Love Dick. This was not aided by was her role as a renegade artist who had become a major property owner, so there was significant attention on real estate deals. It follows that she currently desires to try out different types of content, turning outward to the experiences of others, at a period in which she claims that current political era renders personal narrative unnecessary.

Several Eras, Shared Inescapable History

The Four Spent the Day Together is structured in three parts, encompassing three generations – each trapped by their pasts. The book includes the narrative about a couple named Emma and Jasper, based on Kraus's parents, moving from the urban environment to the Connecticut countryside. Then there is the account of Kraus, in the character of protagonist Catt Greene, grappling with the belated success of I Love Dick, the ascent of a political figure, and her substance-dependent spouse a man named Paul. And there is the narrative of a homicide of one troubled youth by another in a town long abandoned by liberal ideals only a short distance from the protagonist's home in a remote part of Minnesota.

From my perspective as a reader drawn to refined literature of the type Kraus often avoids, I was seduced by the literary tone of the first section.

As someone who reads drawn to precise prose of the variety that Kraus herself tends to eschew, I was seduced by the storytelling approach of the initial part. There is a fresh level of observation that allows space for minutiae, like the bucket that the youthful Catt frees from the ice at the opening of the book, aided by her cherished parent. "I discovered a frozen plaything!" she declares; "a nice toy", he responds, "the elliptical meanings of words tumbling in their mouths like sweet treats". Kraus writes the tale of Emma with curiosity and intimacy. "It seemed to Emma she had entered a dream – not hers, exactly."

Letdown and Fragmentation

I was destined to be disappointed when I hoped this fresh tone could persist to the end. Kraus notes here that she dislikes the enjoyment audiences such as myself have derived from I Love Dick; she's devoted to fragmentation, to the messy artistic approach she shares with her inspiration Kathy Acker, and the emptiness and redundancy of her previous novels reasserts itself in the second segment. The protagonist is trying to renovate multiple decrepit residences in Albuquerque's worst neighbourhoods while shuttling between Minnesota and LA, failing to help her husband manage his alcohol use. She is overwhelmed as her spouse transitions between underfunded jobs as an addiction therapist in a world driven by the hostility and dread that powers Trump's victory. There are several pages about Catt's social media ostracism on Twitter, her professional designation altered from "author" to "property owner" on Wikipedia. She still gives the impression to invest excessive emotion about this. At one point she says that she's looking into the killing so that before departing the state, "she might be able to learn something about an America that her social media opponents would fail to comprehend, would not even see".

The Homicide Account

Thus we arrive to the homicide in question – and the eponymous day experienced by the murdered individual with the perpetrator and his friends. Kraus utilizes excellent raw material, and knows hour by hour what occurred as the victim Brandon came to see Brittney after encountering her on a platform where she sold sex pictures. He anticipated intimacy but seems amiably to have occupied the day with her companions, wandering about fixing his automobile and paying for snacks and drugs, before being murdered by Brittney's boyfriend Micah – a young, mentally ill man who has repeatedly received inpatient care for aggressive outbursts.

Preoccupation and Open Ends

The protagonist becomes fixated by the story, and I was fascinated by the way that her twin drives towards ethical reporting and reckless transgression wrestle in this part. But I'd have liked her to delve deeper into her individual preoccupations here. The compelling persona is the character Brittney, who becomes vivid partially because of Catt's identification with her – a similarly gifted, tormented individual derailing in a difficult, overlooked locality. The author informs us that Catt speaks to Brittney in prison, but she omits the dramatization of these talks. The complete segment feels strangely incomplete, to the degree that her narrative ends almost mid-par